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When Childhood Ends

I personally don’t think that anyone’s childhood ever truly ends. When, and if, you have children, you will play with them all the time! You have to be childish around them because if you’re serious all the time, what fun is that to them? They will also grow up and be a very serious person, which isn’t always a bad thing, but believe me, it’s not easy.

For me, I know my childhood isn’t over, although I did have to do a lot of growing up very early in life. As a lot of you may know, I am a foster child. So when I did live with my biological parent, it was not easy. I was basically the mother in the household from the time I was 11 until I decided to leave when I was 16.

We, as in my biological mother and I, lived in Georgia for a good part of my life. I went to Elementary school there, so you can imagine my age. Well, one day my biological moms ex boyfriend decided he was going to break into our house and try to shoot her. After that, we fled from Georgia and came to Tennessee. This is where everything happened.

We were a very poor family, so my biological mom and I lived in a one bedroom apartment. One day she met a man, whom was on meth, and she decided to start dating him. Well, he had a son, who tried to hit my biological mother because he seen his father do it. His father was an alcoholic. They were together for five years before she finally broke it off with him, but what she went to wasn’t any better.

She met a man who was in a gang. He was also on meth, but he somehow talked my biological mother into doing it. After she did it, she got addicted since she liked it. We only had one source of income, which just so happened to be a SSI check from my father’s passing in 2010. I noticed that money was gone. We didn’t have food, we were getting behind on bills, we had no holidays, and she always stayed in her bedroom with this man. Now, I may have been 16, but I was not stupid. I started studying her behaviors and how she hardly ever ate and how she never slept. There were different people in and out of my house all the time.

I knew I didn’t want to be in that situation, but I was afraid to tell someone. I think my fear of being just like my biological mother was bigger than my fear of telling someone because after a couple of months of studying and thinking about it, I finally told my best friends mother. She told me to tell the school counselor when I was ready, and that’s what I did. In February of 2015, I was taken out of my home and put into a foster home. At first it was scary because I didn’t know the people, but I adjusted well. While I was there, my best friends mother was taking PATH classes to become a foster parent so that I could live with them. After four months, I finally got to move in with them and that is who I currently live with.

I have opened up to these people and told them my whole life story and we are a very open family. It was hard to make the decision that I did to leave my biological mother, but it had to be done. In the end, I know that I made the right choice.

I would also like to encourage everyone out there to become foster parents! Every day more and more teenagers are coming into custody with no place to go due to a shortage of homes for them. I know we can be a handful sometimes, especially the ones who have addictions ourselves, but please understand that we just want to be loved! We made some bad choices in our lives, but with your guidance, we could get through that! We understand that you don’t trust us at first, but remember, we don’t trust you either. We have to work on the trust together! Trust is earned, and if you don’t try to get it, you won’t!